Over on the Red Hat site there’s a post that makes the cases for the Emacs, Vim, and Nano editors. That may seem like blasphemy to some but different people do have different needs and expectations from their editors.
The first problem is that the post begins with the quote, “Text editors. They aren’t something that most users put a lot of thought into.” Huh!?! Sometimes it seems like that’s all we think about. As ESR once said, programmers spend most of their tube time in their editor so of course we spend a lot of time thinking about them.
I’ve used all three of those editors, although I’ve used Nano only when building a Gentoo Linux system until I could get a real editor installed. The section on Nano pretty much supports this: It’s a simple, straightforward editor that’s intuitive and easy to use. I’m not sure why any serious developer would use it other than to bootstrap a system where other editors aren’t available.
I thought the section on Vim was the best and most compelling. The writer, Ricardo Gerardi, makes a good case for Vim and details all its advantages. It’s fast, light weight, and has the wonderful composable command set.
Sadly, the Emacs section was the least persuasive. As I’ve said many times before, if you want a fast, flexible, intuitive editor, Vim is for you. If you want a programming environment that serves as a sort of operating system—or more to the point, a sort of Lisp Machine—then Emacs is for you.
As for Nano, I suppose you could think of it as a replacement for ed in those situations where you need an extremely lightweight editor to get things going but I can’t imagine using it in my day-to-day work. Of course, other folks disagree. The nice thing is that there are plenty of editors that will meet almost anyone’s needs.